Oh gosh, finally news that's got nothing to do with patents or smartphones or the comparing of male sexual organs. Haiku news! Michael Lotz has added preliminary support for WPA to Haiku, taking the first steps towards making the Haiku wireless stack a lot more useful.

Well, there is partial support for the AR9xxx series, those being AR9160, AR9280, and AR9285 based cards. I am posting from an AR9280-based card (SparkLAN WPEA-111N) that I installed in my laptop today just for wireless in Haiku. It seems to be working just fine in Haiku as I type this.

That said, the sources aren't up to date with the latest trunk of FreeBSD, so your concern is valid. The sources will likely be updated once FreeBSD 9.0 is final quite soon. That should bring in the additional drivers that you require. If you feel adventurous and build your own Haiku images, you could probably drag in the FreeBSD sources and edit the Jamfile in src/add-ons/kernel/drivers/network/wlan/atheroswifi accordingly to build the driver you desire. That said, the directory structure has changed a bit recently in FreeBSD, as Haiku still has a bunch of drivers in the AR5416 directory, whereas FreeBSD broke them out into the AR9001 and AR9002 directories to make things more sensical. Haiku will naturally follow suit when the newer sources are merged back in.

With regards to the intel_extreme, you may have the same issue as me with r42742 of Haiku, where there was a regression for some people (including me). I filed a ticket at http://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/8001 about it, but in the meantime just reverted the directory with the intel_extreme sources back to r42741 for the times that I build a new image.